Uber looks to double its engineering headcount in India

Ride-hailing company Uber is looking to double its engineering headcount in India by taking the number of employees in its Bengaluru and Hyderabad centres to 1,000 in the next 12 months.
“This year, we’re going to double our investment in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) and Hyderabad when it comes to headcount, especially in engineering,” Uber’s chief product officer Manik Gupta told ET. “We see great talent here who want to solve the problems they face every day, but also the problems of millions of people.”
The San Francisco-headquartered company is using India as the base to build and experiment with new products, according to Gupta, exporting them to markets such as Latin America and Africa. The charge, led by Gupta, mirrors similar moves by global technology giants Google and Amazon which have built large development capabilities in the country.
Last year, the company rolled out Uber Lite, a product built from scratch in India for the domestic market, which has now been taken to 16 other countries across the world. Uber now wants to build more products that are tailored to the India market, as it believes they could hold the key to making inroads into emerging markets.
Gupta—who has served a three-year-long stint in India when at Google to build mapping products—said the country is a great place for the company to experiment with new ideas as it is witnessing a boom in Internet usage, data consumption, and smartphone adoption.
However, he argues that Uber is uniquely placed to build products in the country. “I would challenge you to find other global technology companies who have development centres here that actually build new products from the ground up. India is sort of a laboratory for us and we’re excited to see what can come out of here, learn from it and launch globally,” he said.
The move to push development in India comes at a time when Uber is gearing up to go public in 2019, in what could be one of the biggest initial public offerings of the year. At the same time, it continues to burn cash in India and other emerging markets, where it is locked in battle with regional players such as Ola.
The India development centre will also begin contributing to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s goal of making Uber a transportation platform than just a ride-hailing company. In the coming year, the company is expected to roll out products that tie in multiple modes of transportation such as metro rails, cabs, bikes, scooters, etc.
However, Gupta said such products, while they would debut globally in a limited way in 2019, they’d take longer to come to India as challenges around regulations still exist.Shoot